Comic-Con Stays In San Diego, Turns Down Los Angeles

After flirting with Los Angeles, Anaheim and even Las Vegas, it looks like organizers of the annual Comic-Con convention will stay in San Diego for another five years.

Nerds across L.A. are sighing right about now. Sorry guys, you'll have to catch Olivia Munn on G4 as usual. The good news: The comic industry fest will keep that laid-back feel and won't turn into the episode of Entourage it was destined to become if it moved any closer to the Endeavor agency.

In other words, Hollywood has had its sights on Comic-Con for a long time. Comics are fodder for the magic word in Tinseltown these days: franchises.

It's okay Ari Gold. You can drive two hours and spend some time in old S.D.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that Comic-Con will make its official announcement Friday morning.

The convention was holding out for an expansion of the relatively small San Diego Convention Center. It got that and more.

The Manchester Grand Hyatt, San Diego Marriott and Hilton San Diego Bayfront gave up 300,000 square feet of meeting space for free. And the number of rooms made available to conventioneers was doubled to 14,000.

"We've always had a desire to stay in San Diego, and we had three amazing proposals," Comic-Con spokesman David Glanzer told the U-T. "It was obviously a very difficult decision, one born out by the amount of time it's taken to make that decision. But in the end San Diego was able to address a lot of our concerns."

The paper reports that Los Angeles was rumored to have offered the convention free rent at its Convention Center. But no dice.

L.A. Weekly staff writer Dennis Romero has worked on staff at several magazines and newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian, and, as a young stringer, the New York Times.